Hello. We are a Credit Union that is starting to use Marketo. Our CRM is called Symitar, which is mostly used in the Credit Union Industry. I'm wondering if anyone else uses Symitar and Marketo. I'm not sure how to sync the two data bases. Is using APIs the only option? Any advice would be much appreciated.

ETL stands for "Extract, Transform, Load". It's a category of software that can do the 3 things on data. These software can extract data form one source (e.g. Marketo), transform it (data syntax and semantics) and load it into another endpoint (e.g. Symitar). They usually come with a whole family of connectors and some configuration tools to set up the flows.

There are literally hundreds of these types of products on the Market. Amongs them, Informatica, Workato, Zapier, Bedrock Data, Talend, MS SSIS, ...

We're working with a Credit Union client using Symitar + Marketo... you didn't just start there, I wonder?

The integration is currently using (not entirely successfully) an integration via Symitar exports, SFTP, and the Dell Boomi Marketo connector. We came on board after this architecture was decided on -- it would not have been our first choice -- and are helping troubleshoot Boomi's insufficiency in this regard. For the future, our goal is to eschew Boomi and use a custom integration that can apply better dedupe logic. Either way, as you surmised, this is not a built-in bidirectional sync and is a bespoke app that will be relatively brittle even in the best of times.

Same here. Marketo was purchased years ago, and I just came aboard 8 months ago. AND we've barely used the product. The contract is up in a couple of months and will consider ditching it if we can't get a good solution. Thank you for your input.

As Sanford suggests, it is not ideal for a bank to use this without heavy support. You must also never push key account info into Marketo. It is not PCI compliant. You may also want to encrypt your instance which is a 15% fee.